Shopping the library

Ravelry has so many patterns in its database that I sometimes find myself drifting from one to another for an hour or more. There is just so much beautiful and crazy stuff out there. A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to make a sweater for our younger niece for her birthday. I drifted along for a bit, then noticed the checkbox for “in my library” when I was in the advanced pattern search. Well, now, why buy a pattern when you have definitely hundreds, likely more than a thousand, in years of accumulated books and magazines? I checked the boxes to narrow it down to a toddler cardigan; one of the first things that turned up was the Tuckernuck Cardigan for which I had appropriate yarn already in the stash. It was kismet.

Very pretty little sweater blocking here, very bad cell phone in-the-morning-before-proper-sunrise photo where you cannot see the beauty of the colors at all:

This was going to be a brown sweater with pink trim and should have been done in time for the birthday. I swatched with the sleeves as usual and made them first, weighed the remaining brown yarn and figured I had enough for the body. And it turns out that was a big fat no. So I lost several evenings’ work to make pink sleeves and unraveled the brown ones to finish the body. The yarn is Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece. Button bands will be pink. The great news is I did visit her for her birthday and the pieces I had done fit. Now to hustle the finishing before she grows (heaven forbid).

Anyway, back to shopping the library. If you have been diligent about putting your books and magazines in Ravelry, this feature can be put to great use. After writing that sentence above, where I speculated I had over a thousand patterns… well, I learned that was grossly underestimated. Just now I checked the boxes for “knitting” and “in my library” and apparently I have a minimum of 4,441 patterns available to me right this very minute in my very own home. That’s sobering. That number doesn’t take into account some of the older books I have that have, say, 20 patterns but only 6 are in Ravelry. Wow.